10 years later, a gunshot echoes

Ten years ago last week, Patti Colbath walked into the backyard of her Phoenix home and found her 12-year-old son Max standing there with a handgun.

The principal's office of Desert Shadows Middle School, where Max was an eighth-grader, had called Patti at the insurance office where she worked to say that Max did not show up for classes after lunch.

That wasn't like him. He was a well-behaved kid and a responsible student, gifted enough to have skipped fifth grade.

He played the violin. He took karate lessons. He had attended gun-safety classes with his father.

Then the bright, sensitive, beanpole of a boy (he'd sprouted to 5-foot-10 as he entered puberty) put the pistol to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

There is nothing worse that a parent could witness.

And yet here it is, 10 years later, and Patti Colbath has . . . survived.

I spoke to her for the first time about a month after Max died. I talked to her again last week.

"I went to a psychiatrist some time after it happened and, unfortunately, you have to tell the story all over again," she said. "He looked at me almost with an expression of incredulity and said, 'How are you still alive?' "

She almost laughs. Almost. She hasn't lost her sense of the absurd.

"I think of Max every day," she said. "But you know, I'm still here. Still doing the best I can. What else can you do? There is no magic. No one or nothing can bring him back. Sometimes it just hits you and the memory brings you to your knees all over again. But . . . you go on. And now it's 10 years. Ten years. That seems crazy to me."

Max would be 22 years old. He would have recently finished college. And he'd be a new uncle. His sister, Melissa, recently had a daughter.

"The baby is the most beautiful thing," Patti said. "She's a great joy to Scott (Patti's husband) and I. So is her mom. Although it's strange, now that we have a grandchild some of the people wanting to make us feel better will tell us that the baby is a gift from Max. But no, she's not. She's a beautiful grandbaby and our daughter is lovely, and we couldn't be happier for her, but there really is no cosmic connection to Max or anything like that. There's not."

The day that Max shot himself he had said something crude about the school's vice principal - on a dare - and came to believe that the vice principal had heard him. (He hadn't.)

"I don't ponder on it the way I used to," Patti said, "But he must have been devastated by the thought that he might have let us down. You wish that he'd talked about it. He'd seemed so happy. He was testing for the baccalaureate program that Saturday. He had his first boy-girl party. As far as I could see, everything was going along great."

Not long after Max's death, Patti's co-workers planted a memory tree in Max's name at Cactus Park in Phoenix.

She goes there sometimes to talk to him.

"You don't recover," Patti said. "But you have to live. You have to get up. To get dressed. To put your shoes on.

"There are other people in your life and you love them. You want them to be happy. And YOU want to be happy. I've asked Max over the years for some explanation, some sign that he's OK. I miss him with all of my heart and soul every day of my life. But there is nothing that I can do."

Max's story isn't simply one of tragedy, but of perseverance. Of courage. His family suffered the worst thing imaginable and found a way to go on.

Patti said that on the anniversary of their son's death, she and Scott planned to have lunch together, spend time at Max's tree and visit with friends.

"Then I suppose we'll cry all the way on the ride home," Patti said.

But the next morning they'll get up. They'll get dressed. They'll put on their shoes.